The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (44 page)

Platt thought the lieutenant colonels looked like the dogs seen in the back of Fords with spring-loaded nodding heads, they wagged their heads in agreement so hard. He began some loud musing of his own. ‘There are a lot of people who get to be full colonels in the Air Force who are so full of shit that you can smell them all the way across a barroom. They go around spreading rumors and lies about Air America getting fifty thousand dollars a rescue, when in fact they don’t get a dime. In the case of the guys who picked me up they lost a day’s pay. While the Jolly Greens were hovering over Long Tieng in those goddam armored battleships of theirs, an unarmed H-34 kicks off its cargo and goes out there and picks up a man in the middle of the jungle. Not because he’s got five hundred other people involved suppressing fire, but because he’s got the balls to go and do it.’

The colonel sprang from his seat, maddened with rage. He moved to Platt at the bar and stood in front of him yelling so hard his face turned purple. Platt turned back to his drink. ‘Fuck you, colonel. You’re so full of shit you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

The colonel lost all control and swung a wild right. Platt blocked the punch, hauled himself onto the bar stool, and kicked the colonel in the chin. He fell to the floor, and Platt went with him. It had happened so quickly that the lieutenant colonels had sat rooted to the spot. Now they jumped from their seats and rushed over. Platt pulled himself to his feet, grabbed his canes, and hobbled to the door.

The next morning everybody on the base at Udorn wanted Fred Platt. At the squadron office an airman regarded him with awe. ‘Everybody’s looking for you. They want a piece of your ass.’

‘How big a piece do they want?’

The airman looked at him appraisingly. ‘More than you’ve got.’

‘That’s all I need, one more report.’

‘Did you really hit the colonel?’

‘Yeah, I did.’

‘Goddam.’

At the 432nd Central Base Personnel Office, Platt was told that a large awards and decorations file waiting to go through had been held back, and a court-martial was being considered. ‘If they court-martial me I’ll scream holy hell and demand a civilian trial. I’m goddam
Mister
Platt. Take the gongs but keep your hands off my ass.’

Platt had already been awarded a Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, and three DFCs, and had been recommended for a whole collection of other medals, which were now variously downgraded or dropped. Even so, he received forty-eight decorations from his time in Laos. On his way out of the country he met a new Raven on his way up to Long Tieng. Platt showed him the three Purple Hearts. ‘Jesus,’ the newcomer exclaimed. ‘What have I volunteered for?’

It was a question all sorts of people were about to ask. The secret war in Laos was about to go public. Although the B-52 bombing followed the same secret reporting procedures as those in effect for the clandestine bombing of Cambodia, news of the strike was leaked to the meager press corps in Vientiane, and a report was carried in the
New York Times
the very next day.
[169]

Laos, which had been largely ignored by the press corps, suddenly became a hot political issue. The B-52 strike for which Kissinger fought so hard had proved to be not only militarily ineffective but also an enormous political blunder. ‘One B-52 strike was enough to trigger the domestic outcry,’ Kissinger writes in his memoirs, seeming both surprised and angry that this should be the case.
[170]
The antiwar activists in Washington had been given exactly what they needed.

In an attempt to counter criticism, the administration replied, truthfully, that it was helping the Laotian government resist North Vietnamese aggression. But the secrecy was now to boomerang, and the explanation was not enough. The report of the raid in the
New York
Times, followed up a week later with stories of ‘armed Americans in civilian clothing’ in Laos, loosed a fusillade of criticism, and senators stood in line to denounce the U.S. action.
[171]
Dr. Kissinger attempted to explain. He seems to have accepted as reality the diplomatic version of events in Laos, repeated for so many years in Washington, by both Democrats and Republicans through three administrations. ‘No American administration could possibly desire a war in a country like Laos,’ Kissinger said. ‘It would not make sense to expand the conflict into Laos, except for the minimum required for our own protection, when we were busy with-drawing troops from South Vietnam.’
[172]

There was no war in Laos, Kissinger seemed to be saying, and from this preposterous premise it was easy to make the logical conclusion that no American had been killed in it - something the president very much wanted to believe. The uneasy equilibrium which the United States had always accepted, Kissinger went on, had been disturbed in January when the NVA fielded an extra thirteen thousand troops in Laos on their push through the Plain of Jars.

This threatened Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma and U.S. relations with him, Kissinger writes. ‘If he abandoned his acquiescence in the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hanoi’s logistical problem would be greatly eased, exposing us in South Vietnam to growing peril.’ This was what the Americans had always believed, although the North Vietnamese had proved themselves capable of surmounting any interdiction effort the United States could stage. ‘Worse,’ Kissinger continues, ‘if the North Vietnamese troops reached the Mekong, the war would lose its point for Thailand. Bangkok would then be under pressure along the hundreds of miles of the river dividing a plain without any other obstacles. We would almost certainly be denied use of the Thai airbases essential for our B-52 and tactical air operations in Vietnam.’
[173]

These views, at the very least, were controversial. Various Vietnam experts in the State Department insisted that the North Vietnamese January offensive in Laos was nothing new - designed as always to put Vang Pao’s troops and the Royal Lao Army on the defensive, and keep the Trail open. But even if the NVA intended to battle through to the banks of the Mekong, common sense would suggest that the war for the Thais, faced with their deadly enemy on a long river border impossible to defend, might not ‘lose its point’ but become of the utmost importance. (Faced with that reality today, Thailand receives massive military aid from the United States.)

But even if Kissinger’s grasp of military realities in Laos was weak - a single B-52 strike was supposed to succeed where a million tons of bombs and eight years of continuous war had failed - it is hard to understand why he had not foreseen the political consequences of such an action. It was the one act which brought the flimsy card house of ‘secrecy’ in Laos tumbling down.

Kissinger’s recommendation had proved to be a political blunder. He now recognized the need for some formal statement of administration policy and intentions in Laos, and it was agreed that the president himself should make it. ‘Why I agreed to a procedure that would put the White House in the direct line of fire on every factual dispute - whether it was bureaucratic inexperience or simply exhaustion with endless attempt to pass the buck - is impossible to determine at this late date.’
[174]
Out of context the ambiguity is ironic - Kissinger did not mean to suggest he was exhausted by his own attempts to pass the buck. A public statement was prepared by his office, the draft of which Kissinger had taken charge of himself, and was delivered by President Nixon to the nation on March 6. While no doubt he would not have made the secret war in Laos public except for the intense political pressure he was under to do so, Nixon went much further than either Johnson or Kennedy in telling the American people what was going on in Laos.

Unfortunately, this tentative step toward disclosing the larger truth about Laos was overshadowed by the details of the statement, which included a number of half-truths and one clear misstatement - information that was fed directly to an unsuspecting president by Dr. Henry Kissinger.

The press listened to the statement and looked for the story. Nixon had stated that there were fifty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers in Laos, while more than thirteen thousand additional combat troops had been fielded in recent months. The press added the two figures together (some newspapers even rounding the figure out to 70,000). Unfortunately, the night before the presidential address, Jerry Doolittle, a USIS official in the press attaché’s office in the embassy in Vientiane, announced at a press briefing that there were only forty thousand troops in the country. Difficult as it was to make an accurate estimate, the discrepancy was ludicrous.

‘We had to ask guidance from Washington, and they came back saying they had good, solid intelligence,’ Doolittle said. ‘What they had done was add up every conceivable estimate.’ Doolittle wondered why, if Washington information was so accurate, it was not being made available to the men whose job it was to fight the war.
[175]
Worse than the conflicting reports on the numbers was the bald statement ‘No American stationed in Laos has ever been killed in ground combat operations. ‘
[176]

Kissinger goes to considerable lengths in his memoirs to explain how this happened. He claims that Nixon intimated to him that the best way to prove that no Americans were involved in ground combat in Laos was to emphasize that none had been killed in such activities. ‘No one cares about B-52 strikes in Laos. But people worry about our boys there.’
[177]
People clearly did care about B-52 strikes in Laos, and Nixon knew they cared, but this is what Kissinger claims he said. He now went about giving the president what he wanted.

Winston Lord, Kissinger’s special assistant, reported that there had been some casualties among American reconnaissance teams - codenamed Prairie Fire - on special operations over the border. Kissinger chose to ignore these, ‘since these activities were clearly related to the war in Vietnam and had nothing to do with battles in northern Laos.’ Careful wording, it was thought, would be able to change reality. ‘We thought we could sustain a sentence to the effect that “No American stationed in Laos has ever been killed in ground combat operations.”
[178]

The special-operations people did not count because they ‘were not stationed in Laos’; the CIA contract people did not count because they were secret; the Ravens did not count because ‘technically’ they were stationed in Thailand; Air Commandos and Air Force ground personnel were also classified Top Secret; Air America and Continental Air Services did not count because they posed as civilians. Even so, when the draft statement went over to the Pentagon it was returned with the line referring to no American combat deaths struck through twice. Kissinger allowed the statement to stand.

Two days after the president’s address, the
Los Angeles Times
carried an account of Capt. Joe Bush’s death in the firefight at Muong Soui airfield the previous year. Nixon was now caught in a blatant lie. ‘Nixon was furious at what he considered to be a failure of my vaunted staff,’ Kissinger writes, shifting the blame to those who worked for him.

Kissinger now set about absolving himself from blame. ‘Making a flat statement of fact on matters extending over nearly a decade is a certain sign of inexperience. One can never be sure what facts are stacked away in the recesses of the bureaucracy that will suddenly appear. I soon was to be given a lesson in the perils of being too categorical.’
[179]

Kissinger was irritated by the major controversy which blew up over the statement, as if it were an unwarranted fuss ‘produced in part by the agencies’ being less than meticulous about supplying my staff with all the details (since they would not be taking the heat), in part by an honest bureaucratic bungle.’
[180]
Again, neither would Kissinger take the heat - President Nixon received the full blast of press criticism over the Laotian statement. Not a single paper tied Kissinger to the deception, a reflection on the masterful way he managed the Washington press corps.

Kissinger was irritated further when the Pentagon told the partial truth. ‘The bureaucracy suddenly began leaking to the press what it had not been able to bring itself to inform the president - that some very few Americans stationed in Laos, civilians and military personnel
not
in combat, had in fact been killed by random fire over the previous nine years.’

The White House was ‘forced to acknowledge’ on March 8 that it now had information from the Defense Department that six civilians and one army captain, ‘who was not engaged in combat operations,’ had been killed in Laos since the beginning of 1969. ‘An average of four Americans had been killed in Laos in each of the preceding years.’ These figures, too, were nonsense. Two hundred Americans had been killed in Laos, with another two hundred missing or taken prisoner. These figures had been put on the record by Ambassador Sullivan in the classified hearing the previous year. (Sullivan, as deputy assistant secretary of state, was subjected to an FBI wiretap until February 10,1971.)
[181]

‘Subsequent inquiry into who was responsible for the errors produced the unstartling conclusion that it was a result of a series of misunderstandings and a failure of communication,’ Kissinger writes. One reason the conclusion was so unstartling was that the postmortem was conducted by Kissinger’s own man and ‘close personal friend,’ his special assistant, the luckless Winston Lord.